Sacrifice Read online

  So after high school graduation, all Dave saw of Sagebrook was the hospital and his home until he escaped to U Mass. He hadn’t avoided the Village Green in particular, but standing on it now, he realized he would have. The very smell of the place, the antithetic combination of salt marsh stink and the sweet scent of the recently cut grass, brought a hollow dread to life within him.

  He hobbled down south on Main. He paused in front of one of the old Colonial era homes. A large maple’s roots had buckled the sidewalk from below. The tree was several feet around now, much larger than when Dave saw it last. He knelt down and inspected the base of the trunk. A scar ran across the bark about a foot or so up the trunk. The tree cocked off at an odd angle there before continuing its upward journey with a slightly smaller trunk. The scar from the accident, where his bumper gashed the tree. The tree was one resilient plant to survive the impact.

  Dave traced the ripple with his left hand. Subconsciously he touched the side of his damaged leg with his right. A moment in time, and all paths change whether it’s a person’s life or a tree’s growth. Plant or animal, we all carry our history with us though life, he thought.

  He continued down to the old mill pond. The first settlers had dammed the stream and built a mill for grinding the local corn, wheat and flax they grew. The pond was now home to a troop of Canadian geese that refused to migrate and a battalion of noisy mallard ducks. Dave remembered how he used to punch holes in the bread bags when he was little so they would go stale. Stale bread was the only kind his mother would let him “waste” feeding to the mill-pond ducks.

  At the end of the pond loomed the old mill, a two-story little building with a high, peaked roof. The exterior was done in cedar shingles, but they were nowhere near as weathered as the homes in the village. A huge waterwheel protruded out one side of the building, a circular aberration grafted to all the structure’s straight angles. The wheel stood still. The sluice gate that fed it water was closed.

  The building made Dave shudder. The tourists who dropped by might think it was quaint and rustic, but they didn’t know the place like Dave did, the intimate way all the Half Dozen did.

  Dave forced himself closer. With each step he felt a layer of maturity slough off, like peeling an onion. Years of accumulated strength and self-assurance flaked away, and the closer he got the closer he was to his own inner core. At that core was the seventeen-year-old kid who was terrified the last time he walked down this street, but too naïve and inexperienced to be terrified enough.

  He stood at the waist-high picket fence that surrounded the mill. His heart ran hard in his chest. His right leg quivered. He gripped the tips of the fence to steady himself. The dew-covered surface felt cold and unwelcoming.

  Through the windows Dave could make out the interior of the mill, just as he remembered it. Both the first and second floors had several rooms. The largest was the first-floor milling room. The drive shaft from the waterwheel powered a series of large wooden gears inside that pushed the millstone against the round bed stone in the center of the building.

  There was one difference in the building. At the base was a bronze plaque that read:

  MILL HOUSE RESTORED IN 1981 THROUGH THE GENEROUS DONATIONS OF SAGEBROOK CITIZENS.

  Of course it was, Dave thought. They couldn’t very well have let it sit here in the condition we left it. That would be too painful a reminder of that awful night.

  A faded handbill was taped in the corner of a front window. It advertised the Sagebrook Memorial Day Celebration from the start of the summer. Minutemen re-enactors. Sailboat races in the harbor. Toy boat races on the pond. A parade. Local baked goods sale including, for the first time in over one hundred years, fresh-ground local wheat from the old mill itself.

  A padlock secured the mill house door. But standing outside was close enough. Restoration or not, it sure felt like the same place he’d been thirty years ago, and he didn’t need to get closer and turn up the volume on that.

  Dave pivoted on his cane and started back to the Village Green Inn. Remembering the past had started a throbbing in his leg that was beyond being ignored. This little sojourn was a stupid idea, physically and mentally. What the hell had he been thinking?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  St. Andrew’s Episcopal was every inch a New England church. A few blocks from the village green, the old church had been the first one the founding families had raised. Behind it lay the small cemetery where most of them were buried. Some of the gravestones were so old that acid rain had long rinsed all the names from their surfaces.

  Inside the church, after over one hundred seventy years of celebrations, the walls were infused with the twin scents of melting wax and smoking incense. The narrow nave hosted two columns of dark wooden pews, each a dozen feet long. The ceiling was at least thirty feet high, a steep peak with exposed beams that looked like the ribs of the ships the harbor used to host. Stained glass windows with the images of apostles lined the walls. The morning sun streamed though them to paint the floor in a pastel mosaic. Behind the carved altar at the end of the sanctuary rose a life-size carving of the crucified Christ, face contorted in agony as he sacrificed himself to save others.

  Jeff, Marc and Ken sat on the right side of the church, Dave and Paul on the left. They sat one row back from the front to leave the first rows open for family. They were too optimistic. Only Bob’s older sister Lori came to represent the family. She was sixty with a long, careworn face. She wore black jeans and a black, long-sleeved blouse, as if the dress code had been “funeral casual.”

  “That’s it?” Dave whispered to Paul. “Where’s the rest of Bob’s family?”

  “Lori may be it,” Paul said. “Bob’s mother died long ago, his father was never heard from after he took off. His other sister Barb lives in Massapequa and I bet she couldn’t care less.”

  Bob’s cremated remains were in a wooden box that looked like it could hold a dozen cigars. It sat on a small table at the head of the center aisle between the pews. A framed picture of Bob sat on top of the box. He wore a dark suit, and his hair was temporarily tamed and parted to the right. He beamed. It was his high school yearbook picture.

  “She couldn’t find a more recent picture?” Dave said.

  “Beats using his mug shot,” Paul said. “After he got out of jail, Bob’s family shunned him. I doubt they have a more recent picture.”

  The priest passed by their pew wearing a long white vestment with a red cross embroidered in the center of the back. The old man had a fringe of gray hair and thick glasses in plastic frames. Paul looked back across the sanctuary. One woman in jeans and a summer blouse sat in the back, looking like a tourist who’d stumbled across the funeral.

  “Damn,” he said. “We’re the only ones here.”

  The priest began with a few prayers and delivered a short homily on Bob. It was ninety percent stock funeral patter, though he did claim to remember Bob from his altar boy days. He spoke about the eternal rewards that await us all and concluded with a prayer. He bowed to the altar and left. The whole event took fifteen minutes.

  Lori Armstrong stood and followed in the priest’s wake. She paused between the pews and pointed a thumb over her shoulder.

  “He’s yours,” she said.

  “You’re not burying him with the family?” Jeff asked.

  “I wouldn’t contaminate the ground,” Lori said. “I only arranged the service because I promised Mom I would. I had him cremated for the inside joke of burning up the arsonist. I’m done.”

  She marched down the aisle and out the door, leaving five slack jaws behind her.

  “Remind me to be nicer to my sister,” Dave said.

  While the others filed out, Paul approached the altar. He laid Bob’s picture face up on the wooden box of his remains and carried them outside to the others. They all stood on the church steps looking horribly uncomfortable.

  “Well, this sucks,” Jeff said. “This is just too young for any of us to die. I mean, I know
the guy smoked himself to death and got lung cancer, but still…”

  “He did have lung cancer,” Paul said. “But I did a little checking this morning. Here’s a big surprise. The cancer didn’t kill him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “What do you mean he didn’t die of cancer?”

  “I’ve got connections in the Suffolk County Police,” Paul said. “A retired NYC sergeant gets some professional courtesy. I called the coroner and asked about the autopsy results. She found tumors in his lungs, two of which were the size of baseballs. But she said they hadn’t killed him yet. The toxicology report showed enough Darvocet in his system to drop an elephant.”

  “And the cops didn’t tell anyone?” Ken said.

  “He had a prescription for them,” Paul said. “An overdose suicide of a terminal cancer patient isn’t uncommon.”

  “Unless he planned a reunion that started seventy-two hours later,” Jeff said. “In that case it’s damn uncommon.”

  “There was no suicide note?” Marc said.

  “Cops found him in his car on the side of the road,” Paul said. “There was no note there, but no one ever checked his house. Cops have bigger fish to fry.”

  “Or bigger donuts,” Dave said.

  “Everyone up for checking out Bob’s place?” Paul said.

  “What’s Lori have to say about it?” Marc said.

  “Yesterday, I told her what the coroner said,” Paul said. “She didn’t care how he died. She gave me the key to his place and told me we could take what we wanted. She has a service coming in next week to throw everything out before the landlord charges her another month’s rent.”

  “Did I mention I never really liked her?” Dave said.

  “Let’s do it,” Jeff said. “We’ll follow you, Paul.”

  The route to Bob’s headed south past Selden though a neighborhood that looked increasingly rough. If anyone needed pictures to illustrate the phrase “suburban blight,” there were shots aplenty here. Liquor stores, pawn shops and tattoo parlors lined the cracked sidewalks, repeating like the scrolling background in a cheap cartoon. Apparently there was no limit to the demand for these services. The car caravan turned right onto a residential street.

  No one knew what to expect Bob’s place to look like, but certainly nothing this bad. Sometime in the ’50s this starter neighborhood of tiny boxes had been the post-war dream come true for dozens of families escaping the city. No one could claim that now. Weeds choked what was left of the small yards. What fences still stood were bronzed in rust. Each house had its own casualty list of shingles and shutters. The cars in the street were at least a decade old, and odds were a third of them wouldn’t move. A guy in a black tank top and baggy pants slouched against a street light gave Jeff’s rented Caddy a thumbs up. An emaciated stray dog wandered across the street, sniffing for the trail of something edible.

  They pulled up to Bob’s address. The little white shoebox was the last on the block that hadn’t had the attached garage haphazardly transformed into more living space. The few bushes at the front door were trimmed, and a hodgepodge of grass and weeds covered the ground. The roof was fully shingled and the asphalt chips sparkled in the sun, like the house was an old lady smiling to show off her new dentures. Bob’s was the best place on the block. The Half Dozen’s cars filled the street and driveway.

  “Bob might have been renting this dive,” Dave said as they all met on the porch, “but you know he did the roof repairs and the landscaping on his own.”

  “The guy was always working,” Paul said. “He wouldn’t have been able to stand looking at something he knew how to fix.”

  The inside of the house was unnaturally dark. Cardboard covered the windows from the inside and blocked every lumen of sunlight. Flicking on the lights revealed a house decorated in a yard sale motif. The few sticks of furniture were old and worn. The bare walls cried out for pictures to break up the expanse. The television was vintage 1990 with a digital converter box sitting on top. An open pack of cigarettes lay on the coffee table next to an ashtray full of crushed butts. The air smelled of stale cigarette smoke and rancid food.

  “Spread out,” Paul said. “See what we’ve got here.”

  A few minutes later they reported back that the bed hadn’t been made and the kitchen sink had some rank dirty dishes in it. The refrigerator was stocked as was the pantry. An open, empty bottle of Darvocet was on the bathroom sink. A payroll stub said Bob’s employer was “Johnny on the Spot,” a portable toilet company. By the dates listed on the wall calendar, it looked like he worked the nightshift driving what the boys used to call the SST, the Shit-Sucking Truck.

  “There wasn’t a suicide note anywhere,” Dave said. “Though having his job would warrant one.”

  “A little respect, please,” Marc said with disgust.

  “You processed a thousand crime scenes, Paul,” Jeff said. “What’s your take?”

  “Nothing here says Bob was suicidal,” Paul said.

  “There’s still the garage,” Jeff said.

  They went outside to the garage. Bob had been the mechanic in the group. Oil changes, brake jobs, new mufflers. They came to Bob with everything. Jeff’s sad Pinto would never have made it through high school without Dr. Bob’s emergency surgery. They all expected a full set of rolling toolboxes and a pegboard wall full of tools. There was a gasp from the group as they opened the side door.

  A folding table in the center held stacks of papers, some yellowed with age. Photos, maps and newspaper articles papered the walls like an enormous collage. Items in the articles were circled in red marker, and some of the pictures were annotated with arrows and dates in the same ink.

  “This is creepy,” Ken said. They spread out and checked different sections of the walls.

  “Oh, man,” Jeff said from the right hand side. “This stuff is from senior year. It’s all about the Woodsman.” Marc joined him at that wall.

  Photocopied articles from the Sagebrook Standard covered Josie Mulfetta’s death and Vinnie Santini’s trial and conviction for manslaughter. There were the stories Marc had read thirty years ago in the library, Caroline Cody falling from a tree, the two boys electrocuted on the power lines, the short death notice of the infant boy they attributed to SIDS.

  Next to the pictures was a map of Sagebrook, one of the ones real estate agents used to give away. The edges were tattered and several of the creases had degenerated into tears. A series of green dots peppered the area around the old village.

  “Jesus,” Jeff said. “That’s our map. How the hell did he ever get a hold of that?”

  Marc walked left and searched for dates until he found 1966. The Woodsman’s deeds were documented. Pictures old and new, articles from the local paper on the children’s deaths, even a short Newsday piece on the day camp barn fire and the six kids who died.

  “Bob was researching the Woodsman,” Marc said, “and not just from when we went up against him.”

  “No shit,” Dave said from the other side of the room. “There are incidents here from the 1930s, from the turn of the century.”

  “But this stuff here is new,” Jeff said. Everyone gathered around.

  Crisp sheets of paper on the far wall looked like they had been printed from Internet pages. There were stories about accidents and near misses with young children culled from Newsday and the now online version of the Sagebrook Standard. A boy drowned at the millpond. A girl who fell off the roof of her house. A few simple infant death notices.

  “Bob was watching,” Marc said. “All these years. In case we had failed. In case he came back.”

  “Maybe Bob was sure the Woodsman was back,” Jeff said. “Maybe he didn’t call us home for a reunion. He called us back home to kill it. For good this time.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The events of the day, the funeral, the revelations about Bob’s life, the possible return of the Woodsman—all exposed more raw emotions than anyone wanted to admit. That night, no one plan
ned to meet for dinner. Jeff begged off with the excuse that he wanted to take a drive around town. He had noticed the Venetian was still in business. They had passed it on the way to Bob’s.

  Back in the old days, Katy and her family had lived on the second floor, a convenient setup for commuting to work and a great excuse to cadge snacks when he’d come see Katy. Access to the world’s best Italian food had been just another of Katy’s selling points.

  Jeff wondered if she had taken over the family business. It looked unchanged from the outside, except for the sign that said “Free WiFi” in the window. The same blue-checked curtains hung in the front bay windows. The front door was still a garish red. The neon script sign that said “The Venetian” was still there, but the last two letters were out tonight. Jeff seemed to remember that one or another letter had seemed to always be out on that sign. There were a few cars in the parking lot.

  This little vacation down Sagebrook’s memory lane had been awful. Reunions should not morph into funerals. The good memories he had of his friends were being washed out by those awful experiences they had the last time they were together.

  There was still one highlight that might come through. In the time before he hooked up with self-destructive women, there had been Katy. Seeing her again could be a pleasant reprieve from the gloomy results of the last few days. Jeff decided to give it a try. Maybe she’d be here, maybe she wouldn’t be. Worst case, he’d have dinner.

  The restaurant’s interior hadn’t changed much. The dining room was still woefully under lit. Tall leather booths lined both walls; a collection of square tables sat in between. The paper placemats still had maps of Italy, and Jeff guessed that the back still had a maze and letter puzzles for the kids. Squat candles flickered in wrought iron holders on each table. A smattering of guests populated the place.